Marvel has a hit on its hands with Echo, the MA-rated superhero venture starring Alaqua Cox that performed well on both Hulu and Disney Plus, and did so with a budget of $40 million, less than 20% of some of the MCU’s enormous, unwieldy series like She-Hulk and Secret Invasion.
Now, the success of Echo is having ripple effects, and it seems tohave triggered what might be the solution to Marvel’s up and down run of Disney Plus series, risking it all with these massive budgets. There are reports that Echo has spawned big increases in the viewing of old Daredevil seasons, and now filming restarts on the reworked version of the show that scrapped an original poor revival idea and is instead building straight from season 3 of the Netflix original, with the original cast and revived guest stars like Jon Bernthal’s Punisher.
THR reports that Marvel has larger plans for Echo, despite her show being pitched as a miniseries, and that now extends to the rest of the “street-level” MCU:
“Marvel is interested in doing more with the character and is already developing new ideas as it seeks to build out its street-level heroes.”
Again, the draw here is a combination of cost and quality. Daredevil, for instance, is considered to be a top tier MCU show (well, recently adopted MCU show), if not the best Marvel production (it can fight it out with Wandavision and Loki). The cost for season 1 of Daredevil was reportedly somewhere between $42 million and $56 million, again, not just a fraction of the massive costs of larger MCU shows currently, but that was for thirteen episodes, as I think people forget just how big those Daredevil seasons were.
Marvel already has five different heroes it can bring back to life from Netflix, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and The Punisher. You could also argue it has the potential for spin-off characters that already appeared like Wildcat and Elektra. Plus, already introduced D+ characters like Kate Bishop and Moon Knight could be street level as well. And of course, there is now Echo herself who has technically sparked all this with her hit show.
The crown jewel of the “street level” idea might be plans for Tom Holland’s next Spider-Man arc, given that he has essentially been “reset” given the events of the last film. While he will no doubt appear in the Avengers films in a few years, given that he is the OG street-level Marvel hero, integrating him with this crowd seems like a potential big win all around, if they pull the trigger on that.
Disney does seem to recognize the potential of this, years after shunning the Netflix series. Now it may be one of their biggest hopes to turn their streaming ambitions around.
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